Recommended Tool: PureText

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There are a few tools that I use so often, that I can imagine some of you might be interested in them as well. The first one is PureText.

It’s a small nifty application that will simply remove any text formatting from the contents in the Clipboard. You can assign a hot-key to paste the text (without the formatting). I use the default setting of the Windows Key+V. When I want to paste everything with formatting, I use CTRL+V, otherwise, WINDOWS+V. Really cool!

As the Author (Steve Miller) says “PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.“

Best of all, the tool is absolutely free. Highly recommended: http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

SharePoint 2007 Quickie: Adding Lists to a Meeting WorkSpace

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In a previous post, I complained about the fact that SharePoint 2007 is not intuitive enough. With this Quickie, I want to share the best way to add a List to a Meeting Workspace:

  • The way not to do it: I thought you needed to select Site Actions > Edit Page and then Add a Web Part to add a Custom List to a Meeting Workspace.However, if you do that, you get a list of Web Parts that you can add, but not the list you would expect (or at least, the list I expected). I was looking for a way to add a Custom List, but just a few predefined Lists (Attendees, Directions, Discussion Board, …) appeared. There was no way to add a Custom List:
  • The way to do it: Simply select Site Actions > Create to add a Custom List to the Meeting Workspace. If you do that, you get the full list of things you can add:The List will be added to the left hand side at the bottom, but after creating it, you can select Site Actions > Edit Page to move the List somewhere.

OK, I have to admit that it isn’t that illogical after all to use Create for adding a list, but then again, it would have been nice if you could do the same when using Add a Web Part.

SharePoint 2007: More bugs

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Unfortunately, my experiences with SharePoint 2007 are revealing more bug.

  • I already mentioned the issue that after saving a Meeting Workspace as a template, the resulting Meeting Workspaces don’t not keep the view settings that you defined in the template.
    Specifically, I created custom lists in a Basic Meeting Workspace, saved it as a template and then used it as Meeting Workspace (created from Outlook).
    In the template, the lists are defined as showing the All Items view with a Summary Toolbar:However, when actually using it, the meeting workspace always shows a different view, with a Full Toolbar. On top, one of the lists even shows a drop-down box where you can choose a view. It’s not logical that this happens:
  • When I tried to add a Column to a list, clicking the OK button did not do anything. Debugging the issue, the problem lies in a Javascript error: “Helperfrm is null or not an object”. I’m not the only one with the problem. The only work-around I found was to use the FireFox browser (!) to create the column.